Strange, then, that a French footballer should ignore them all and
express his joy at scoring a yuletide goal with an altogether different
greeting. After Nicolas Anelka scored for his team West Brom, he made
the sign known in France as the “quenelle”. For the non-gastronomic
amongst you, a “quenelle” is a sort of sausage usually made from fish
and breadcrumbs. The gesture itself is also a mixture – it’s half what
the French call a “bras d’honneur” (an “arm of honour” – the “up yours”
gesture made by thrusting one fist forward while clutching your inner
elbow with the other), and half a downward Nazi salute. Anelka [performed]
a very formal-looking “quenelle”, putting one hand at the top of his
arm while extending that arm stiffly downwards. As anyone who has read
about the story will know, the gesture was invented by a comedian called
Dieudonné (ironically, “god-given”) who has recently made himself
infamous thanks to his outrageously anti-Semitic comments (I wouldn’t
call them jokes), including one about a journalist who dared to
criticize him and who, in Dieudonné’s opinion, ought to have gone to the
gas chamber. (Now you see why i don’t call them jokes).

Everyone in France knows about Dieudonné, and he has a cult following
amongst the tiny minority who enjoy race-hate comments. There are
doubtless a few youngsters who make his “quenelle” gesture out of
ignorance, thinking that it’s purely anti-establishment, in the same way
as the punks in the 1970s wore swastikas just to annoy their parents’
generations – they weren’t (usually) Nazis. The same presumably went for
Prince Harry when he made his Nazi uniform party outfit gaffe. But an
experienced international footballer who knows full well that the few
seconds after a goal has been scored are the most filmed and
photographed moments of a match? And who has been photographed with the
originator of the gesture, joyfully performing a “quenelle” duet?

Say what you like about the average IQ of a Premier League
footballer, if there’s one thing they understand it’s the media. They
are all experts at promotion. Many of them make as much money being
photographed as they do on the pitch. And Anelka’s gesture didn’t look
as though it was being made in the grip of wild elation. He looked calm
and collected. It looked to my, perhaps over-cynical, eyes that the
gesture was a deliberate sign, aimed perhaps at certain sections of
impressionable French youth, that it’s OK to say the kind of things that
Dieudonné’s fans go along to hear.

It seems a shame, when the French put so much care into expressing
the hope that everyone will enjoy each small segment of the day and
night, as well as the different sections of the end of the year, that
someone thinks it’s OK to send out a mass-media message that is exactly
the opposite.

… the quenelle is the odd gesture — an extended right arm slanted towards the floor, the left arm stretched across the chest — for which Dieudonné claims paternity. The salute has blossomed both on-line and on soccer fields: a succession of French athletes from Tony Parker to Nicolas Anelka have performed the quenelle in order to signal their… well, their what?

This is where things get fuzzy.

Dieudonné insists the gesture is simply a French raspberry, aimed at “the system.” Obviously, this claim begs the question of its deeper significance for Dieudonné if the Jews, as he suggests, own and manipulate “the system.” It also ignores the context of the gesture — which many critics insist is an inverted Nazi salute — used by Dieudonné to punctuate his racist jibes and anti-Semitic innuendos. A number of athletes who replicated the gesture, ignorant of its import, seem sincerely angry to have been caught with their shorts down.